You, Me & the Sea Read online

  Lefty has been here for a year. A year of being yelled at, and threatened, and grabbed unexpectedly; a year of being called imbecile and wee piece of shite and all the other names he’s been landed with. And he’s still here.

  Says something, that being stuck on an island with a man who hates you is somehow less awful than being stuck in the city where you grew up, surrounded by the people you grew up with.

  Rachel

  Lefty emerges from his room at six, comes into the kitchen and almost jumps out of his skin when he sees Rachel sitting at the kitchen table.

  She has been contemplating making a start on dinner, since Fraser isn’t back yet. Wondering if it would make him happy, or annoy him even more, to come back and find her prepping vegetables to go with whatever is in the slow cooker.

  ‘Hi, Lefty,’ she says, glad to see him on his feet at least. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Grand, aye,’ he says, moving quickly to the freezer and pulling a box from it. It’s a frozen burger, complete with bun. Microwaveable.

  ‘Why don’t you eat with us? You know Fraser’s a really good cook.’

  He mumbles something in response, expertly hitting the microwave’s buttons and jolting it into life.

  ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t mind the three of us eating together.’

  ‘He would mind.’

  ‘Shall I ask?’

  He doesn’t respond. His back is towards her, shoulderblades sharp through the thin fabric of his T-shirt, the neck of it frayed. The microwave pings just at the minute the door opens from the outside, and Fraser fills the doorway, Bess scampering past him. Lefty grabs at the box and practically runs back to his room.

  They both hear the door shutting firmly.

  Fraser looks rough, she thinks. He’s not looking at her. As if something bad happened. As if he’s trying to pretend she isn’t there.

  ‘Hey,’ she says, gently. ‘You okay?’

  ‘What was he wanting?’

  ‘Just his dinner. I didn’t get two words out of him.’

  ‘Right.’ He’s unlacing his boots, pulling them off, leaving them on the mat by the door.

  ‘I was going to start doing some veg,’ she says. ‘Only I didn’t want to piss you off any more than I have already. So, you know, if you want me to do anything to help, I’m here.’

  She notes that he does not deny being pissed off. Instead he washes his hands, gets out the chopping board. She looks at his fierce, hard back, the fight in his shoulders, and turns away. In the time it takes him to get the vegetables on, she has written a whole blog entry about the helicopter and has started a second one about kittiwakes.

  ‘Tell me again the difference between kittiwakes and gulls?’ she asks.

  At that point he’s washing up the chopping board, wiping the surfaces, his back still to her, but then he turns and leans back and actually looks at her for the first time. ‘They’re completely different birds,’ he says.

  ‘Well, obviously. To an expert. But I’m trying to appeal to the non-birdwatcher here, right?’

  He expends a heavy sigh. ‘Kittiwakes are gentle wee things. They have a very distinctive call, nothing like a gull. The young have very specific markings, also nothing like a gull. If you saw them side by side you’d see the difference straight away.’

  Rachel shuts her laptop. This isn’t working.

  She watches as he gets the whisky glasses out of the cupboard, brings them over to the table. A peace offering, she thinks.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says.

  ‘What for?’

  He doesn’t reply.

  She clears the laptop away and lays the table and by the time she’s done that dinner is ready and for some reason she can’t help herself. He has apologised and it’s almost as if it’s given her free rein to push him, to find those buttons and jab at them hard, and she doesn’t know why but she would rather have angry Fraser than anything else right now. Because he wrote to Marion. Because of Lefty, staggering back from the tern terrace. Because of all the shouting and swearing.

  ‘Do you actually want me to do a blog?’

  He shrugs vaguely. ‘Thought it would keep you out of mischief,’ he says, and raises his eyes to her.

  She doesn’t know quite how to respond to that, so she changes the subject. ‘Marion seems to think she’s going to come over for a visit. With a builder and an architect.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘She emailed earlier. Which reminds me – she said you’d been in touch with her about the arseholes down at the bird observatory.’

  In response to this he makes a non-committal humph and shovels some food in.

  ‘Thanks, anyway. I appreciate it.’

  ‘Nae bother. They’re not all arseholes, you know. You just got unlucky with the first lot.’

  ‘Right. Do you ever get women, or is it going to be grey beards and camo gear every week?’

  ‘We sometimes get women. Some of them don’t have beards.’

  This makes her laugh, properly laugh, so she has to put her fork down, and then he’s looking at her, amused. Thank goodness.

  ‘I guess this isn’t the best job for meeting women,’ she says.

  ‘That’s true enough.’

  She wonders if a line has been crossed. Not enough whisky has been consumed for this conversation to be happening. But, now it’s started, he can’t just be allowed to leave it there. She thinks about it, trying to get her head around what he could possibly mean, and then she just comes out with it, because she is not able to just leave things.

  ‘So – what? You just go without?’

  He doesn’t answer. Spends several minutes eating without looking at her.

  ‘You’re full of the personal questions tonight,’ he says.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘sorry.’

  ‘You go for it, I don’t care.’

  ‘But you’re not going to answer. Why not? Are you worried I’m going to judge you?’

  Now he looks at her, full on. ‘I’m not worried about anything,’ he says. ‘Least of all what you think of me.’

  She raises an eyebrow at him, because this feels like a challenge. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Are you actually interested in what I think of you?’

  ‘Not especially. But I think you’re going to tell me anyway. Aren’t you?’

  It’s very tempting to disabuse him of that and shut up. For several minutes she manages it. When she looks away she can feel his eyes on her. When she looks at him directly, he goes back to eating. There’s a weird atmosphere now, as if he’s testing her. And she’s testing him, too. Would he get angry at her, properly angry, the way he does with Lefty? She doesn’t think so. She can’t imagine him yelling at her. It feels a little bit dangerous, this – poking the bear. Seeing how far she can go.

  ‘How about what you think of me?’ she asks.

  ‘That’s a difficult question.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You might not like the answer.’

  ‘I’m willing to risk it if you are.’

  He’s finished eating. Somewhere in there she stopped, and now he’s pushed his plate to one side and he’s regarding her with something in his eye that she thinks is amusement, though perhaps it’s annoyance.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he says. ‘I think you’re out of your depth.’

  ‘Well, duh. I’ve said as much.’

  ‘I think you’re capable of much more than you think you are. I think you’re spending too much time worrying about the past.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  ‘I like you better like this.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Arsey. Challenging. Brave.’

  She has no response to that, so she carries on eating. She would absolutely not describe herself as brave. Or indeed arsey, or for that matter challenging. She is, actually, a little bit offended.

  ‘Go on, then,’ he says after a few minutes.

  ‘What?’

  �
�You were going to tell me what you think of me. Fair’s fair.’

  She narrows her eyes at him, as if she’s trying to psychically connect. Wondering what words she could choose out of the many that have been floating around inside her head.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Go for it.’

  ‘Um … well. Arsey. Challenging. Vulnerable.’

  He throws back his head and laughs, a proper meaty guffaw. ‘Vulnerable?’

  Rachel stares him out. ‘That level of arsiness only comes from a place of true vulnerability.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘Absolutely. Why else are you so opposed to relationships?’

  She sees some sort of shutter come down at that, thinks for a minute she has poked the bear a little bit too hard. There is a long pause and then he collects the plates and goes to wash up. She follows him, picks up a tea towel, waits for him to come round.

  ‘How’s the blog?’ he asks, eventually.

  She has the impression he said it for want of something neutral to say. She fishes out her phone and brings up the first entry, a general one introducing the island, written yesterday evening. So far it has thirty-one hits. Her new Twitter account has forty-three followers, thanks to her following pretty much everyone who follows the Isle of May’s Twitter account. One of these days she will hunt down every seabird enthusiast and follow them. As she checks it, three notifications pop up with new followers. On the blog is one comment, from someone called SteelySeabirder. It says, Nice.

  ‘Thirty-one people saw it? Since yesterday?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Good going.’

  He seems to have forgiven her for her interrogation of him earlier, but she hasn’t forgiven herself. This is what she does, she thinks – she oversteps the mark. She fails to see when she’s pissing people off. She gets too close to people too quickly. It’s as if she hasn’t learned anything, anything at all.

  Before things get any worse, she takes herself off to bed, leaving Fraser downstairs with Bess.

  Mel sent a message earlier this afternoon:

  She hasn’t replied yet. And now, because she feels the darkening shadow of an imminent Rachel fuck-up, her mind keeps going back to the conference. The thing that ruined everything with Amarjit, the thing that precipitated her fall into depression.

  In the days and weeks after it happened, when she was staying up all night and sometimes sleeping in until four or five in the afternoon, not getting dressed, not showering for several days at a time, she would think about it all, every conversation, every encounter, everything he’d said to her and what it might have meant, right back to that meeting room and Amarjit strolling in late.

  She had never been paid attention like that. She had never been listened to before, never been seen in the way he saw her. It wasn’t inevitable. If she had known, if she’d had hindsight, of course she wouldn’t have fallen for him quite as hard as she had. But she didn’t know how to stop herself. She didn’t even want to stop herself.

  Fast forward all the way to that conference.

  That first night … everyone drunk. She was looking for Amarjit everywhere and whenever she found him he was drinking with a group of people, and she was thinking, oh, that’s fine, and waiting for the moment when he would come and look for her and tell her his room number. She knew it anyway, of course. She had done all the room bookings. He would come and find her and tell her to come up in five minutes. And then what actually happened was, she went looking, after midnight, and couldn’t find him. She was absolutely exhausted by this point because she had been working without a break since seven a.m. She decided to go to her room and send him a text, just a little reminder. Something cheeky. And he’d reply with something like yeah sweetheart come over I’m waiting. She had organised it so her room was just three doors along from his. This would make it easier for her to go to his room, or for him to come to hers; lower the risk of someone seeing.

  And she stepped out of the lift just in time to see Cheryl, one of the PAs, someone Rachel thought of as a friend, standing outside his door. Then the door opening, and Cheryl smiling and walking in. And the door closing behind her.

  It hit Rachel hard enough to jolt through the alcohol into cold reality. She thought maybe she had made a mistake. Maybe she was on the wrong floor. Maybe that wasn’t his door after all. She went to check. Walked right up to it. Eventually put her ear to the door, heard Cheryl’s shrieking laugh, briefly, then a squeal, then Amarjit’s voice saying, ‘Take this off.’

  She went back to her own room and drank her way through the contents of the minibar. Since Amarjit would eventually be signing off her hotel bill, she thought it unlikely he would complain when she told him what she’d seen, what she’d heard. She went through all the conversations that would take place back in the office, next week. He would challenge her about her bar bill, which was already huge, given that she’d been buying drinks for everyone, even without the extortionate expense of the minibar. She would tell him what she’d seen. She would be hurt, resentful, but ultimately dignified about it. He would be apologetic, devastated; he would tell her that Cheryl had come on to him, that he was so drunk he’d barely known what he was doing. That she had knocked on his door. That he had – could it be possible? – thought it was Rachel, opened the door, and then maybe he’d felt unable to say no.

  How could she even have thought any of those things? she thinks now. How could she have instantly hated Cheryl, who had been nothing but kind to her and at that point had known nothing – as far as Rachel was aware – about her feelings for Amarjit? And how could she have casually absolved him of any blame in it?

  Well, it felt dazzlingly obvious now. Because the alternative – that he was an arsehole who was using her for sex and actually did not care for her feelings at all – had been just too painful.

  And then – because it had to get worse, didn’t it? – the last night of the conference. And now, finally, she’s going to take herself back there and confront it.

  Saturday night. A five-star hotel in Manchester. Rachel can’t even think of its name now without feeling sick.

  She has been busy photocopying a document three hundred times because one of the marketing managers had changed his mind about including it. Couriering some promo booklets from the printer to the hotel. Arranging a hire car for someone whose company Merc had had a sideswipe from a lorry on the M6 on the way up. The only way she is coping is by staying very slightly drunk. A shared bottle of wine with lunch keeps her going until the evening. Two vodkas and a gin from the freshly restocked minibar while she is getting ready for the gala dinner. She has been thinking about resigning, worrying how hard it might be to find another job. Recruitment agencies don’t like it when you walk out of temporary contracts; it makes them look bad. She has been thinking about what she will say to Cheryl in the car on that long drive back to Norwich, and she has changed the table seating plan, moved herself from Amarjit’s table to one not too far away.

  At the last minute she swaps the place-markers so that she won’t have her back to him. She is wearing a dark blue dress, short, and high heels. She spends a lot of time on her hair and her make-up. If she can’t tempt him away from Cheryl and back into her bed tonight, looking like this, then she has lost him and nothing will work.

  The meal is fine. She doesn’t eat it.

  At that point in her life she is measuring her value wholly in terms of how much attention Amarjit pays her. A little over a year later, on an island in the North Sea, lying awake in bed with tears dripping down her temples, she will feel ashamed of that. But now, in the conference hotel, despite feeling vulnerable and alone, she wears her short dress like a kind of armour, strides comfortably in heels down the thickly carpeted corridor.

  The change to the seating plan means that she has a full view of him when he steps up to the podium to give his speech. He’s looking relaxed, sleeves folded up over his forearms, heavy expensive watch, the dark hairs, the way his musc
les work under the skin. She wants to run her tongue up the inside of his forearm more badly than she’s wanted anything in her life. He talks about the conference and makes people laugh. He talks about the prospects for Caleril and how they are going to make a genuine difference to people’s lives by promoting it to GPs and to cardiovascular physicians in hospitals.

  At that point, he says he has a special guest.

  Rachel has had three double gin and tonics in the bar before dinner, plus most of the bottle of house wine on the table that nobody else wanted to touch. She is watching Amarjit and thinking of what she would like to do with him, later. She is visualising how she is going to approach him, what she’s going to say, how his eyes are going to flick down to her cleavage and back to her face.

  At that moment the special guest comes to the podium. Applause, whistles. Most of the people in the room seem to know who she is. Amarjit introduces her as an associate professor of cardiothoracic surgery. And he says he is proud to add that she happens to be his wife.

  He kisses her and applauds as he backs away to his seat, his chair fully turned so he can take her in. She is beautiful, poised, fluent, clearly brilliant. Rachel finds she cannot breathe properly. She hears almost nothing of the speech. The room, suddenly airless, swims.

  Afterwards, to make everything worse, Amarjit brings her over to Rachel’s table – most people have gone to the bar and she is still sitting there, hollowed out and dark – and introduces her – ‘Darling, this is Rachel; she’s the one who’s been looking after me so well in the office’ – and Rachel has to stand and try to smile and shake a cool, delicate hand that feels like a baby bird but which has opened ribcages and restarted stopped hearts. Her own heart sputters, broken into pieces.

  It would have been easier if she hadn’t been so lovely. ‘I understand he must be a complete pain in the arse to work for,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t do it.’

  Amarjit’s wife says, ‘Are you okay?’ seconds before Rachel crashes sideways against the table and throws up. It keeps coming, and coming, all the liquid pouring out of her, barely a second in between to gasp a breath, almost choking on it. Amarjit’s wife holds her hair. Rachel passes out, and when she comes round a few moments later she is in the recovery position, the carpet against her face, her nostrils stinging. Lots of people are crowded round. An ambulance is called, but it doesn’t take her to hospital. She spends nearly an hour sitting in the ambulance in the car park, crying, and retching into a cardboard hat. Later, Cheryl takes her to her room and ends up staying the night in case she’s sick again.